ANthem Prints News

Jon and Bill Walker will be featured in a live radio interview on Tales from the Golden Road, on SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead Channel on August 4th at 4pm Eastern. Afterwards, a recording of the interview will also be accessible from anthemprints.com.

Listeners will learn about the origins of this iconic, psychedelic image and how Bill captured the Dead’s music in visual form. Tune in to hear personal, Grateful Dead stories including about Bill’s friendship with bassist, Phil Lesh, Warner Brother’s pressure to deliver the art for the summer 1968 album release, and Bill’s labor of love to refine this quintessential portrait of the band and their music.

The background of the original painting was unfinished when the album was released. Twenty years later, Bill finally completed the 38” x 38” Anthem painting, with a meticulously detailed background. He released a Limited Edition run of 300 collector-quality Serigraphic prints of the mandala-inspired artwork, with 67 layers of silk screens printed with German oil paints on museum-quality paper. After the print run, the screens were destroyed and no other collectors’ prints were produced. However, most of these artworks were never sold.

The remaining Anthem Limited Edition prints were impossible to find for the last 15 years until Deadhead, John Estrin, made it a personal quest to track down the missing art. In January, Jon’s efforts were rewarded with a personal visit with artist Bill Walker. Now, one year after the 50th anniversary of the Dead’s release of Anthem of the Sun, a very limited number of Bill’s psychedelic artworks have finally been made available to the public at anthemprints.com.

Tune in to SiriusXM on August 4th. A handful of the masterworks have been put aside on the Anthem Prints website for listeners of the show. Visitors to the Anthem Prints site can also enter a giveaway for a free print.

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